I run Opnsense on a Proxmox VM (I followed this guide). I’m quite pleased with it. Opnsense is probably going to be more secure than any consumer router firmware, but you’re going to have to make a bigger upfront investment in hardware. I had never used Opnsense prior to using this system, and the fact that I’m running it on Proxmox is a huge benefit. If I’m ever about to do anything I’m unsure of, I can snapshot the VM in Proxmox. If my router config breaks as a result of my tinkering, I can easily restore from the snapshot.

The pfsense devs has acted like jackasses towards the opnsense gang.

And toward their users. Ask the wrong question on the pfSense subreddit or forum and expect to get lit up. The Opnsense community is much more helpful and inviting in my experience.

Pretty killer specs on paper. In my experience, these AliExpress boards have a bunch of minor annoyances that add up. Examples of those annoyances from my experience include:

• a complete lack of support after the sale (you’ll never get a BIOS update, or if you do, you have to get it from some dodgy Chinese Dropbox-equivalent),
• a lack of 4-pin chassis fan headers,
• outdated SATA controllers that don’t let your computer reach higher C-states, and
• non-standard CPU coolers that you’ll never be able to replace if they fail.